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Photo Credit: BeBe Jacobs
THE NORTON LECTURES
Speaker: Viet Thanh Nguyen
Interlocutor: Gina Apostol, Novelist
Norton Lecture Six: On the Joy of Otherness
To write as an other is to remember the conditions and origins of one’s otherness, which are usually unhappy, both individually and collectively. What are the possibilities in finding joy as an other?
There will be a meet & greet and book signing with Viet Thanh Nguyen before this lecture, from 4:30-5:30pm in the Sanders Theatre lobby. Copies of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s books will be available for purchase at this time. The book sale is hosted by Porter Square Books.
"On the Joy of Otherness" is the sixth of six Norton Lectures with Viet Thanh Nguyen. For all Lecture dates and information, click here. Recordings of Viet's Norton Lectures are available to watch on our YouTube channel.
Free and open to the public, but tickets are required. Tickets will be available in advance two weeks prior to each lecture starting at noon, online, in-person at the Smith Campus Center box office, or by phone. Also available in-person at the venue starting two hours prior. Handling fees apply for online and phone sales. Limit of four tickets per person. Tickets valid until 5:45pm. Please note new ticket distribution procedure.
Free parking is available at the Broadway Garage, located at 7 Felton Street, between Broadway and Cambridge Streets.
About the Speaker
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and numerous other awards. His most recent publication is A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial. His other books are the sequel to The Sympathizer, The Committed; a short story collection, The Refugees; Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction); and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. He has also published Chicken of the Sea, a children’s book written in collaboration with his son, Ellison. He is a University Professor at the University of Southern California. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, he is also the editor of The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives.
Gina Apostol won the 2022 Rome Prize in Literature to write her next novel, on womanhood and radicalism in fin-de-siécle Europe. Her body of work has also been shortlisted for the John Dos Passos Prize. Her last book, Insurrecto, was named by Publishers' Weekly one of the Ten Best Books of 2018, selected as an Editor's Choice of the NYT, and shortlisted for the Dayton Prize. Gun Dealers' Daughter won the 2013 PEN/Open Book Award and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan Prize. Bibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, now out in the US from Soho Press, both won the Juan Laya Prize for the Novel (Philippine National Book Award). She has received fellowships from Civitella Ranieri and Emily Harvey Foundation, among other residencies, and has served as writer-in-residence at Vassar College and Phillips Exeter Academy, among other institutions. Her essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Gettysburg Review, Massachusetts Review, and others. She teaches at the Fieldston School in New York City.
Introduction By:
Howie Tam, Assistant Professor of English at Brandeis University.
About the Norton Lectures
The Charles Eliot Norton Professorship in Poetry was endowed in 1925. Harvard’s preeminent lecture series in the arts and humanities, the Norton Lectures recognize individuals of extraordinary talent who, in addition to their particular expertise, have the gift of wide dissemination and wise expression. The term “poetry” is interpreted in the broadest sense to encompass all poetic expression in language, music, or the fine arts.